


Ersatz

by Triskaidekalogue



Series: HSO 2011 ficbits [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ficbit, Gen, Post-Sburb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-22
Updated: 2011-10-22
Packaged: 2017-10-24 20:40:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/267665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triskaidekalogue/pseuds/Triskaidekalogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gifted new land, new life -- by all rights, she should be content.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ersatz

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [lj user kaiousei's soundtrack](http://hs-olympics.livejournal.com/9563.html?thread=1479515#t1479515) in HSO Bonus Round 2B.

Seconds after her revival, Feferi knew she'd forgotten something very important about living.

Change.

Not the constant, overwhelming sensory chaos that backgrounded the dreambubbles. Not the never-settling forms and dimensions of the Noble Ones. Life was precarious. Unpredictable. And it had gone on while she died. Even her friends had changed, she thought, too subtly to see from a dimension away and too painfully to bear for long with that distance removed.

The first week, she shared everything with Sollux and pressed kisses to his hollow eyelids. Karkat played moirail to everyone and nobody could object: this was their creation and they would make the rules.

The second week, she trysted with Vriska. Their encounters were dark and sharp, kismesissitude at first sight. Feferi reveled in the connection while Terezi fumed, but Kanaya intervened with her usual ashen grace before things got out of hand. By the third week, her quadrants were filled with landdwellers and she was never alone, night or day. Eridan, glowering, stalked off to claim an inland sea for his own.

She ignored the dry little itch that scraped at the inside of her chest.

The fourth week brought heat and scouring winds. The fifth, she organized a rafting expedition with her redrom partners and a few friends, who all categorically refused to swim with her. The sixth week's storms disquieted her until she realized that she'd never spent a storm abovewater before; the seventh, dewed with fog, set her gills fluttering in vain to breathe the wrong way, the right way. The eighth week Sollux suggested she cut her hair to better manage on dry land.

In the ninth week of her revival in the new universe, Feferi Peixes disappeared.

 _I'm going home_ , read the entirety of the note she'd scrawled on the door of her hive. The soil of her threshold was darkened oddly with scatters of water droplets, as if someone had swung the water in arcs.

It was Kanaya who noticed the shape they outlined: curve in, curve out, straight across. Pisces, in water.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally I'd had [this prelude](http://pastebin.com/WKwkZS9D) all begun up, but I decided it didn't quite fit. I'm more dissatisfied than usual with this scribblet and would _particularly_ welcome constructive advice on it.


End file.
